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Rift Wizard 2 News

The Beta Branch is Back

First of all, please join me in welcoming OpportunityDrive to the Rift Wizard development team! Going forward, he will be the main developer in charge of patches and maintenance for Rift Wizard, and I'll be stepping back a bit to work on prototyping new projects and figuring out what my next game will be. This patch is primarily his work.

As for the contents of said patch, so far we've got 31 new items, 5 new Trials, 2 new Spells, 1 Skill, and 1 new Boss Modifier, alongside balance changes, tooltip updates, and typo fixes. This stuff is all very much new, and probably a bit buggy and perhaps imbalanced- hop onto the beta branch and give it a test, and leave any feedback you might have on #rw2-beta-discussion on the discord.

New Items:

Earthquake Boots: Casts your Earthquake every 8 steps.
Rift Key Staff: Creates a Rift at the wizard's location upon level victory.
Fanged Amulet: Each turn, an adjacent unit takes 3 physical damage and you are healed for the damage dealt.
Stoneeater Amulet: Each turn, eat an adjacent wall. Gain 1 HP if you do.
Stormeater Amulet: Each turn, consume all adjacent lightning storms. When you do, you regain a charge of your highest level lightning spell of level equal to or less than the number of storms eaten.
Talking Hat: Your enchantment spells gain quickcast (the first one cast each turn does not conclude the turn).
Blizzard Beacon: Each turn, summons a random number of blizzards. The maximum number summoned each turn is the sum of all SP spent on ice magic.
Raiment of Eyes: Grants your allies your eye enchantment spells that they have matching tags for. Each level, a number of allies may be granted these spells equal to the sum of all SP spent on eye magic.
Draco Antiphony Scepter: When you cast a level 4 or lower sorcery spell, your dragon allies with matching types will attempt to cast that spell also.
Annihilator Staff: Deals 1 physical, 1 fire, and 1 lightning damage to creatures before they would be damaged by your sorcery spells.
Crisis Charm: Restores all life if you would die. Broken after use.
Codex of Sacrifice: For every 100 HP spent casting blood spells, learn a word spell. The HP required doubles each time the Codex is activated. If you know every word spell, instead restores all charges of your word spells.
Chalice of Light : Whenever you pick up an SP orb, each of your holy spells regains one charge.
Chalice of Iron : Whenever you pick up an SP orb, each of your metallic spells regains one charge.
Chalice of Warp : Whenever you pick up an SP orb, each of your translocation spells regains one charge.
Chalice of Dragons : Whenever you pick up an SP orb, each of your dragon spells regains one charge.
Volcanic Lance: When you cast a fire spell targeting an enemy, send out a destructive beam toward the target, destroying walls and dealing fire damage equal to the sum of all SP spent on fire magic.
Erebus Lance: When you cast a dark spell targeting an enemy, send out a destructive beam toward the target, destroying walls and dealing dark damage equal to the sum of all SP spent on dark magic.
Crown of Ragnarok: Nine turns after you enter a realm, cast Earthquake, Flameburst, Stormburst, and Word of Chaos.
Blood Shield: When you cast a spell, lose 1 HP and gain 1 SH.
Heavenrender: Whenever you cast a holy spell, deal fire and lightning damage to all enemies in a 2 tile burst around the target. The damage dealt is equal to the sum of all SP spent on fire and lightning magics, respectively.
Storm Legion's Banner: Whenever an ally is summoned, if it is on or adjacent to a Storm Cloud, the summon consumes it, and gains the stormtouched modifier.
Blizzard Legion's Banner: Whenever an ally is summoned, if it is on or adjacent to a Blizzard, the summon consumes it, and gains the icy modifier.
Death Legion's Banner: Whenever an ally is summoned, if it is on or adjacent to a chasm, the summon consumes it, and gains the ghostly modifier.
Terracotta Legion's Banner: Whenever an ally is summoned, if it is on or adjacent to a wall, the summon consumes it, and gains the claytouched modifier.
Blood Legion's Banner: Whenever you summon a unit with a spell or skill, if it is summoned adjacent to the yourself or another Fleshbound unit, the summon gains the Fleshbound modifier.
Boots of Imminent Doom: Upon entering a rift, immediately cast your Seal Fate on all enemies in a four tile radius.
Boots of Heaven's Assault: Upon entering a rift, immediately cast your Heavenly Blast on all demons and undead in line of sight.
Staff of Heaven's Vengeance: When one of your living or holy allies takes damage from an enemy, this staff deals 7 holy damage to the source of that damage.
Ring of Magnetic Charisma: When you enter a level, turns the nearest enemy lair or construct into an ally
Hallucinogenic Spore Staff: Whenever poison is inflicted on an enemy, they are berserked for three turns.


New Trials:
Cryomancer: Ice magic only.
Amnesiac: Your spells, spell upgrades, and skills, are removed and no longer available after you complete a level. Spent SP is refunded.
Wild Magic: After you complete a level, your spells and skills are randomly rerolled. Levels have no SP.
Blood Rites: Each time you cast a spell, increase its HP cost by its spell level. If it doesn't have an HP cost, it gains one. Resets as the end of each level
Flawless: You have 1 HP.


New Boss Modifier:
Slimy: 50% chance to gain 10% hp and max hp per turn. Upon reaching double original HP, splits, releasing 5 slimes. When this creature is damaged, a slime is spawned nearby.


New Spells:
Rain of Thunderbolts: Casts your thunderstrike spell targeting 12 random Storm Clouds each turn. This spell can be channeled for up to 12 turns. The effect is repeated each turn the spell is channeled. Can be upgraded to summon storm drakes, cast Iceball on Blizzards, or summon Storm Clouds.

Summon Simulacrum: Forges a living replica of the wizard and their equipment. Can be upgraded to heal the wizard for the spell's HP cost on Simulacrum's death, summon a giant immovable statue of the wizard instead, or teach it up to three of your cantrips.


New Skills:
Focused Channeler : Gain 4 turns of Clarity when you cast a channeled spell.


Fixed Bugs:
Attempted summoning with a full level should no longer crash the game.
Upgraded Gold Drake's Healing Light can now heal the wizard.
Pope The Frog's damage gating can no longer be subverted with poison.
Upgraded Rain of Fire should no longer mistakenly cast your Mega Annihilate instead of Annihilate.
Orb's threat indicators should now match their capabilities.
Goblin Wizard's Ignite Poison now uses its appropriate range stat.
Reincarnation no longer duplicates thorn buffs, and it does carry over equipment granted via Armorer.
Multicolor Rage Rod buffs can now be regained if they are removed (typically via Faerie Arcanist)
Spells that target connected enemies should now work appropriately with large enemies.
Reincarnation won't trigger while a unit is Soul Jarred.
Treants no longer threaten the entire level.
Teleport and Teleporters can now successfully target and take you to chasm tiles if you have flying.
Hatebolts pathing no longer blocked by shops and portals.
Earthquake no longer turns chasms into floors, as per its description.
Silkshifter no longer triggers off of minion teleports.

Misc. Changes:
Dragon's breath damage stat removed. Breath weapons now use minion damage.
Added a mercy portal spawn. If you complete a level and there are no portals, one will spawn for you.
Burning Idol no longer sacrifices friendlies if there are no enemies left.
Blood Anima summons at the end of the turn, rather than on cast, so you should be less likely to kill your own bloodghasts.
Seal Fate's Genocide upgrade now does exactly what it says.
Silent Specter and Banshee now communicate their abilities clearly.
Added Soaked, Fear, and Silence status effects to the (H)elp screen.
AI no longer attempts to attack or move toward Soul Jarred creatures with 1 HP.
Players can now mouse over the Challenges Button to see their current challenge modifiers in the examine screen.
Pain Mirror now counts HP spent casting spells as damage.
Geometer Staff radius bonus increased (1->2)

Full Launch

Hello Wizards!

I'm proud to say today, that Rift Wizard 2 is officially and fully launched.

Firstly, thanks to all the beta testers and friends who made this possible. Thanks to everyone who reported bugs, argued about balance, or suggested changes on the discord. I'm a very lucky game developer, to have such a passionate and intelligent audience to draw feedback from. Thanks also, of course, to KHoops and AdamC for their work on the game.

RW2 has been in early access for a little less than a year, and I think its quite ready for general consumption now. We've iterated on a bunch of different ideas and systems, both during the EA period and the private beta before this. Some were awesome and ended up in the final game, some had horrible problems and were discarded. I'm quite happy with the RW2 experience as it is now. Its new and fresh, but also quite reminiscent of RW1, and very much a roguelike, perhaps even more so than its' predecessor.

So... whats next for RW2? Well, now that all the systems are finalized in place, the thing to do is to simply add more stuff: equipment, trials, monsters, spells, and skills. The first 3 especially- adding options to randomness pools is always less disruptive to balance than adding options the player can use at any time with SP- but I'd guess we will be adding one or two tags to the spell shop at some point in 2025 as well.

And of course, we will make some small balance changes when people find absolutely soul crushingly good builds that make wizards wonder why other builds even exist.

On pricing: I'd always said that the price will increase slightly after EA. It hasn't yet- in fact there's a small launch discount- but it will soon. So if you haven't picked up the game yet, now is a good time.

Anyways thanks once again, bringing RW and RW2 to market has been one of the craziest and most rewarding experiences of my life.

-Dylan

Staging Update

A few small fixes today as we move towards full launch:

Fixed a crash that could occur on victory
Fixed death cleave crash
Clarified lightning/fire form tooltips
Fixed a bug that could various spells and effects to not properly see 3x3 monsters
Scourge now freezes animation just like stun and freeze
Fixed starwhale tooltips

Hotfix

Fixed crash for small_size display mode
Fixed crash when fearing 3x3 monsters

Staging Build

Todays patch is quite close to what full launch will be. It focuses on bugfixes and small fixes, but has fewer big features than previous patches. It is meant to be a final cleanup and polish before the game goes full launch.

I will be letting this build sit on main for 2 weeks, fixing whatever bugs I can for a small patch next week, fixing anything urgent with ad hoc hotfixes the week after, and doing full launch on feb 1st.

Changes:

Default summon radius limit 4->5
Wizard levels have fewer wizards
Mutant levels no longer have extra monster spawns and no longer have boss mutants
Added Staff abuser trial- start with any staff you want, but -1 SP per realm
Level spawn mutators (extra 3x3s, lots o mutants, lots o wizards) min level 5->7
Achievements added to game
SimpleRangedAttack (most minion and enemy ranged attacks) no longer count as having their damage types as tags
Mod loading is now deterministically alphabetical
Refactored transform asset loading to allow modded transform graphics
Refactored cloud asset loading to allow modded cloud graphics
Refactored tag filter list to use a global table instead of a hardcoded table inside of a function
Refactored reward generation to use a global table instead of a hardcoded table inside of a function
Added cmd line arg 'newgame' to instantly launch new game
Added cmd line arg 'modfolder' to change what folder mods are loaded from
Flesh colossus got more offensively dangerous and is less of an inert bag of hp now
The game will no longer queue more than 3 visual effects on one tile
Reworked pyrostatic pulse- greater cascade now forking cascade, always hits 2(numtargets) extra units, does not propogate on kill any longer
Equipment and skills now show up as a horizontal stack of mouseoverable icons and take up less space on the character panel
Mega annihilate now has distinct and working upgrades from annihilate
Arcane amplifier can now (theoretically) amplify non spell damage as per its description
Show modified rather than base hp cost of spells in tooltips
Flame maw -50 ice resist and +1 spawn tier
Moon glaive electroblade upgrade now uses radius and numtargets bonuses
Added new 3x3 spider boss
Added new hivemind boss type- all damage is shared amongst all same named hivemind enemies
Bloodflame is now a passive skill which grants fire and blood spells quickcast instead of an enchantment
Multicast no longer procs off of freecasts
Sight of Blood can now target allies
Show duration remaining on rain cloud tooltips
Crackledarkener can now hit allies
3x3 tooltip mouseover now includes the whole monster

Reworked some stat bonus items to have unique effects instead of stat bonuses:
Snow Shoes now heals on freezing a unit
Silken Sandals now grants shield on step
Ankh now deals damage each turn to units adjacent to your allies
Skull Necklace now grants +1 damage to undead minions on casting a dark spell

Fixed rainstorm healing enemies
Fixed floating eye not getting minion bonuses
Fixed flesh fiend belly flop upgrade not having a cooldown
Fixed ice drake not getting duration bonuses for freeze duration
Fixed dragon mage being able to cast scale weave on your summons
Fixed weekly runs sometimes being impossible due to multiple respawnAs modifiers
Fixed menagerist trial crash
Fixed Crown of Bony fingers not being able to target 3x3s
Fixed Wyrm eggs having a cast range
Fixed Stormcaller ignoring duration bonuses
Fixed a crash that could occur if save and reload occur after portals are unlocked but before they are entered
Fixed Blinding Light halting light halting allies
Fixed starwhale not having tags
Fixed hp cost modifiers crashing
Fixed various PRNG bugs that caused non same weekly results
Fixed mass immortality targeting
Final boss list is now more mod friendly
Fixed many typos and tooltip ambiguities, thanks for all those who reported them!
Fixed a bug where bloodbound enemies could get excessive amounts of shielding
Fixed bug where icetap did not remove frozen buff
Fixed Lightning Storm Spirit Harvest giving wrong numbers of spirits
Fixed Lightning Spire Threat display being incorrect
Fixed Word of Chaos targeting being wrong
Fixed Psychic Seedling (and mod summons that use GeneratorBuff, MatureInto, or ChanceToBecome buffs) not getting minion bonuses to things it summoned
Fixed glass orb refraction upgrade refracting non enchantments
Flame gate simplified, now ends on moving or casting non fire spell
Fixed furnace of sorcery flames of sorcery aoe displayh
Fixed ankh proccing on heal and damaging allies
Fixed psychic seedling starting at unbuffed hp
Fixed boss modifiers sometimes not propogating to summons if a monster had multiples of a summoning buff
Fixed troll geomancer petrify spell not petrifying
Fixed realm 21 sometimes not having monster
Fixed smiting thorns reflecting self damage including its own reflected self damage
Fixed 3x3s not running when feared
Fixed 3x3s not meleeing when blinded

Various other small tooltip fixes, thanks to all the hardworking testers on the discord who helped spot these!